The making of a Nature cover

Our guiding principles for cover artwork
Benefits of submitting cover artwork
How artwork is selected
Types of cover artwork
What we seek, and things to avoid
Things to avoid
How to submit
- Cover specifications
- Coverlines

Our guiding principles for cover artwork

Nature-branded journals use a specific set of guidelines and principles in the selection and creation of cover artwork. This guide is for authors submitting artwork for consideration for the cover of the journal Nature and the Nature-branded family of research journals. We encourage you to get creative and submit artwork to accompany your manuscript — and if you follow this guide, you might just end up on the cover!

Benefits of submitting cover artwork

Why should I submit cover artwork? Cover artwork plays a unique role in communicating your research. Striking artwork sparks interest and curiosity in your work, and often engages a wider audience than other scientific visuals such as figures in a research paper, which are powerful but tend to communicate more narrowly.

Hopefully your submission lands on the cover, but regardless, your efforts in creating an accessible, beautiful representation of your research will not be wasted. These types of image are extremely useful for communicating your research in other ways, such as in press releases, posters, presentations, websites and social media, where new audiences are ready and waiting.

Cover of Nature showing an illustration of a virus with the headline 'Covid questions'. — **Social media posts** featuring creative artwork are powerful tools for communicating research to a wide audience.

Screenshot from Twitter or X showing a researcher re-posting a Nature Portofolio tweet promoting the cover. — **Social media posts** featuring creative artwork are powerful tools for communicating research to a wide audience.

How artwork is selected

How do we choose? The selection process varies by journal, but generally speaking, once papers are assigned an issue, a shortlist of cover submissions is made for that issue, and those papers compete against each other for the cover.

There is no one path to a cover — once on the shortlist, artwork can be selected because of the topic of the research or the superior quality of the artwork. In any case, the best way to increase your chances is to follow this guide, submit your best work and make the shortlist.

For Nature the flagship journal only: As a weekly multidisciplinary journal, Nature aims to feature a variety of scientific disciplines from week to week. In addition, the cover story should be freshly published, so there should not be a gap of more than a few weeks from the date of online publication to when it appears in print. Papers taking our accelerated publishing route (AAP) are generally not eligible for the cover for this reason, so if you prioritize a chance at a cover over publication speed, please mention this to your manuscript editor.

Types of cover artwork

There is no ‘best’ artistic medium for covers. Quality artwork can come from anywhere, from classic techniques such as painting and drawing to electronic forms such as 3D rendering, microscopy and digital photography.

Common types of journal cover artwork:

Photography
Illustration (2D and 3D)
Imaging
Computer modelling
Artist conception

Cover of Nature featuring a vivid photo of a green and orange frog sitting on a large green leaf. — **Photography** communicates instantly and effortlessly. It automatically implies a degree of specificity and is most frequently used to showcase specific entities (place, event, species, etc.).

Cover of Nature Geoscience featuring a photo of a sandy landscape with pools of water and stumps protruding from the ground. — **Photography** communicates instantly and effortlessly. It automatically implies a degree of specificity and is most frequently used to showcase specific entities (place, event, species, etc.).

Cover of Nature showing an astronaut's spacesuit in space with a colourful pattern reflected in the visor. — **Illustration** is effective for representing concepts and metaphors. It can be 2D (left, created in Adobe Illustrator) or 3D (right, created in modelling software) and abstract or specific.

Cover of Nature Photonics showing a stylized illustration of a plasmonic modulator. — **Illustration** is effective for representing concepts and metaphors. It can be 2D (left, created in Adobe Illustrator) or 3D (right, created in modelling software) and abstract or specific.

Cover of Nature showing a photograph of space featuring a brightly coloured supernova. — **Imaging takes many forms**, from microscopy to astrophotography, showing us things unperceivable to the unaided human eye.

Cover of Nature Cell Biology showing a brightly coloured photograph of cells. — **Imaging takes many forms**, from microscopy to astrophotography, showing us things unperceivable to the unaided human eye.

Cover of Nature featuring a realistic illustration of a dinosaur with brightly coloured feathers on top of its head. — **Artist conceptions** are illustrations that use data and evidence to artistically reconstruct something.

Cover of Nature Astronomy featuring a realistic illustration of planets orbiting a star. — **Artist conceptions** are illustrations that use data and evidence to artistically reconstruct something.

What we seek, and things to avoid

What we look for in a cover. The best journal covers are a perfect blend of art and science. They tell a story that represents the research accurately, beautifully and creatively, without misleading elements.

Covers are not like figures in your paper — they do not bear the burden of telling the entire story of your research. Rather, they tempt the viewer to learn more. They can be very specific or abstract, as long as they have some of the following qualities.

We seek artwork with:

Beauty (composition, proportion, balance)
Technical quality (resolution, clarity)
Simplicity
Novelty
Action

Cover of Nature featuring an image of coloured fossils of marine invertebrates arranged in an attractive pattern. — **Beauty** comes in many forms, but tends to have a standard recipe: good composition (arrangement of elements within a given boundary), proportion, and effective use of colour. Colour should complement composition. It can be used to create hierarchy, to highlight important elements, to create categories of information, or simply for tone.

Cover of Nature Chemical Biology featuring a watercolour painting of the cells of the skin. — **Beauty** comes in many forms, but tends to have a standard recipe: good composition (arrangement of elements within a given boundary), proportion, and effective use of colour. Colour should complement composition. It can be used to create hierarchy, to highlight important elements, to create categories of information, or simply for tone.

Composition should also consider other elements present on the page such as the journal logo and other text. For example, the original composition (above, left) had to be reworked to accommodate the journal title at the top, ensuring important image details were not obscured.

Cover of Nature showing a robotic fish swimming in front of a real fish on a black background. — **The importance of simplicity** cannot be overstated. A cluttered, crowded cover gives the unpleasant sense of information overload. Try to pare back to the essential elements, and avoid the temptation to throw everything in. Remember, cover art needs only to tempt — it does not have to tell the whole story.

Cover of Nature Nanotechnology showing two spheres suspended by an apparatus. — **The importance of simplicity** cannot be overstated. A cluttered, crowded cover gives the unpleasant sense of information overload. Try to pare back to the essential elements, and avoid the temptation to throw everything in. Remember, cover art needs only to tempt — it does not have to tell the whole story.

Resolution and clarity are absolutely essential, and must be addressed at the very first stages of creating imagery. From digital photography to microscopy, please make your originals as high resolution as possible.
Novelty, seeing something that has never been seen before, or in a totally new way, makes cover artwork particularly memorable.

Things to avoid

Not all publishers of scientific journals share the same styles and standards. What might work for some journals may not be appropriate for the overall style and tone of the Nature-branded group. Here are some of the most common things we see that might disqualify a submission.

Some common mistakes:

Too crowded and cluttered; no thought for composition
Low resolution at full size, blurry or pixelated
Too childish or cartoonish
Overused clichés, such as question marks or puzzle pieces
Copyright infringement, such as depicting a character from film or television
Images created by Generative AI (such as from DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney) are not permitted

How to submit

Please submit your cover artwork through the manuscript tracking system when you upload the final version of the manuscript files. If you are not ready to submit cover artwork at this stage, please follow up with the editor who handled your manuscript and they can provide further instructions. To ensure there is enough time to consider your cover artwork, however, it should be sent to us as soon as possible after the submission of your final manuscript files, ideally within 2 weeks.

Cover specifications

Our covers are 213mm x 285mm. This includes a 3mm bleed on the top, bottom and right.

Files should be at least 300 dpi at actual size, in .psd, .tiff, ,jpeg or .png formats. Lower resolution can be submitted through the system initially, but please add a note that higher resolution is available.

Please leave space in your composition for the standard ‘page furniture’, such as the journal logo at the top and the various coverlines. But please DO NOT include the logos themselves in your artwork.

Coverlines

Nature the flagship journal has one main cover line (paired with a smaller secondary line) that can go anywhere, along with three small teasers along the bottom that do not move.

All other Nature-branded research journals have a single coverline that can go anywhere.

Nature cover layout with guidelines for printing. The cover features a person standing on a boat, balancing a basin on their head, with the title 'BLUE FOOD'. Dimensions are marked as 215mm width and 285mm length. It also shows a 3mm bleed on the top, bottom, and right. — **Please ensure a 3mm bleed on top, bottom and right.** (Indicated here by blue lines, to be trimmed on press.)

On behalf of the art teams at Nature and our portfolio of Nature-branded journals, we thank you and look forward to receiving your beautiful cover artwork.